The NSA’s ultimate goal is to destroy individual privacy worldwide, working with its UK sidekick GCHQ, journalist Glenn Greenwald warned an EU inquiry, adding that they were far ahead of their rivals in their “ability to destroy privacy.” READ MORE: http://on.rt.com/dgt0n5

I envy Obama because he can spy on his allies without any consequences, said Putin when asked about how his relations had changed with the US following Snowden’s espionage revelations. READ MORE: http://on.rt.com/q66cm7

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the absurd tongue eating isopod sitting in the middle of the global financial system and what the system would look like with that parasite ripped out of the host economy. They look at Iceland and Kenya where parasites are being banished with old debt repudiation ideas and with revolutionary new crypto payment systems. In the second half, Max interviews futurist, IT architect and Free Software advocate, Arjen Kamphuis, about the internet in a post re-architected NSA world in which the free network is disintegrating but against which the likes of Google, Oracle and Microsoft are leveraged. They add up the costs to US corporations in lost revenue as nations across Europe and Latin America divorce themselves from industrial espionage on an industrial scale from America.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo is expanding its efforts to protect its users’ online activities from prying eyes by encrypting all the communications and other information flowing into the Internet company’s data centers around the world.

The commitment announced Monday by Yahoo Inc. CEO Marissa Mayer follows a recent Washington Post report that the National Security Agency has been hacking into the communications lines of the data centers run by Yahoo and Google Inc. to intercept information about what people do and say online.

Yahoo had previously promised to encrypt its email service by early January. Now, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company plans to have all data encrypted by the end of March to make it more difficult for unauthorized parties to decipher the information.

Google began to encrypt its Gmail service in 2010 and has since introduced the security measure on many other services. The Mountain View, Calif., company has promised to encrypt the links to its data centers, too. A Google engineer said that task had been completed in a post on his Google Plus account earlier this month, but the company hasn’t yet confirmed all the encryption work is done.

Other documents leaked to various media outlets by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden this year have revealed that Yahoo, Google and several other prominent technology companies, including Microsoft Corp., Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc., have been feeding the U.S. government some information about their international users under a court-monitored program called PRISM. The companies maintain they have only surrendered data about a very small number of users, and have only cooperated when legally required.

The NSA says its online surveillance programs have played an instrumental role in thwarting terrorism.

The increased use of encryption technology is aimed at stymieing government surveillance that may be occurring without the companies’ knowledge. Even when it’s encrypted, online data can still be heisted, but the information looks like gibberish without the decoding keys.

“I want to reiterate what we have said in the past: Yahoo has never given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wrote in a Monday post on the company’s Tumblr blog.

Private telecom providers, businesses and governments are increasingly compelled to move or reinforce web operations following disclosures of the NSA’s mass internet surveillance programs made by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Brazil is set to vote on the creation of a cyber-security system to thwart National Security Agency espionage of Brazilian government systems. US surveillance led by the NSA had infiltrated the highest levels of Brazil’s administration.

The largest telecom provider in Germany, the formerly-state-run Deutsche Telekom, is seeking to keep their service in-country, out of the reach of foreign spying.

But much smaller internet companies are also feeling the need, based on customer demand and common sense, to move their servers out of the reach of the NSA and the United States’ partners in global surveillance, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK – the “Five Eyes.”

Encrypted-communications provider Unseen, for instance, has recently moved its servers and bank accounts from the US to Iceland, based on the NSA’s vast reach and the Nordic country’s commitment to privacy rights.

The National Security Agency is logging hundreds of millions of email and instant messaging contacts belonging to Americans and others around the world, according to a report based on documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The data harvesting program, first reported by The Washington Post Monday, collects address books from email and instant messaging service in an apparent attempt to map social circles across the globe. Online communication services frequently expose an individual’s contact list when that person signs onto their account, sends a message, or connects a remote device – such as a cell phone – to a computer.

An internal NSA PowerPoint presentation indicated that the NSA’s Special Source Operations collected 444,743 email lists from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail, and another 22,881 from other services. The documents note that those numbers show what the NSA collects in one day, meaning the intelligence agency could collect more than 250 million lists each year.

The NSA is capable of collecting approximately 500,000 so-called buddy lists from live-chat services and the “in-box” displays from web-based email services, according to the Post.

Two NSA sources told the Post the intelligence agency uses the data to identify international connections and then find smaller, more nefarious connections between suspected criminals. The collection relies on secret deals with foreign telecommunication companies, with NSA agents monitoring internet traffic outside the US.

The sources refused to estimate how many Americans are snared in the dragnet but did admit it could number in the tens of millions. An unnamed official was careful to mention the collection comes from “all over the world,” and “None of those are on US territory.”

Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the NSA “is focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans.”